or love of the ideas going before us and ever present to us in this world
and in another; and the true order of speech or writing proceeds
accordingly. Love, again, has three degrees: first, of interested love
corresponding to the conventionalities of rhetoric; secondly, of
disinterested or mad love, fixed on objects of sense, and answering,
perhaps, to poetry; thirdly, of disinterested love directed towards the
unseen, answering to dialectic or the science of the ideas. Lastly, the
art of rhetoric in the lower sense is found to rest on a knowledge of the
natures and characters of men, which Socrates at the commencement of the
Dialogue has described as his own peculiar study.

Thus amid discord a harmony begins to appear; there are many links of
connection which are not visible at first sight. At the same time the
Phaedrus, although one of the most beautiful of the Platonic Dialogues, is
also more irregular than any other. For insight into the world, for
sustained irony, for depth of thought, there is no Dialogue superior, or
perhaps equal to it. Nevertheless the form of the work has tended to
obscure some of Plato's higher aims.

The first speech is composed 'in that balanced style in which the wise love
to talk' (Symp.). The characteristics of rhetoric are insipidity,
mannerism, and monotonous parallelism of clauses. There is more rhythm
than reason; the creative power of imagination is wanting.

''Tis Greece, but living Greece no more.'

Plato has seized by anticipation the spirit which hung over Greek
literature for a thousand years afterwards. Yet doubtless there were some
who, like Phaedrus, felt a delight in the harmonious cadence and the
pedantic reasoning of the rhetoricians newly imported from Sicily, which